2. Does thawing frozen vegetables before cooking them help to maintain
their nutritional value?

Yes No

3. Do you generally eat your fruits with the skin off?

Yes No

4. Do you generally eat your vegetables with the skin on?

Yes No

5. Is it true that eating a few almonds before eating a sausage will
help block the negative effects of its saturated fat?

Yes No

6. Do you know how to sauté, steam, simmer, marinate, dry rub,
roast, and grill?

Yes No

7. Do you use herbs and spices liberally?

Yes No

8. Do you usually use a low-fat or nonfat salad dressing on your salad?

Yes No

9. Is milk chocolate more nutritious than dark chocolate?

Yes No

10. Can cocoa lower blood pressure?

Yes No

Scoring: Give yourself 1 point for each correct answer.

1. Yes: Cooking usually unlocks vitamins from the ber in vegetables, and
less cooking is usually better. When you boil your veggies many of the
nutrients end up in the water. You keep the nutrients when you steam.

2. No: Studies show that frozen vegetables maintain a much higher level
of nutrition when cooked frozen.

3. No: Bet you knew this. Much of the nutritional value of fruit is in
the skin.

4. Yes: Bet you knew this, too. Like fruit, much of the nutritional
value in vegetables is in the skin.

5. Yes: Eating a few nuts before eating meat will help block the
negative effects of the meat's saturated fat.

6. Yes: These are healthful ways of preparing foods.

7. Yes: Herbs and spices contain an incredible array of antioxidants
and, of course, great avor.

Food is like sex. When done well, it engages all ve senses; it taps into
our most primal needs and urges and it's among the greatest pleasures
you can experience. And like sex, eating good food is a celebration, and
an af rmation of life.

Would you watch TV while having sex? If it was great sex, probably not.
So why would you grab a burger while running through an airport or eat a
hot dog while sitting in front of the tube?

It's so much more satisfying to enjoy and savor the experience of eating
good, fresh, nourishing food than to eat mindlessly. And like sex,
eating a meal is usually better if you're doing it with someone you
love.

You know you should eat more fruits and vegetables-you've been hearing
it since you were a small child and didn't want to eat your peas. Now
that you're a grown up, your brussels sprouts probably still get left
behind on the plate, and the last piece of fruit you had was the
maraschino cherry out of a mai tai. You know that if you ate more fruits
and vegetables, you'd be healthier. But what you may not know is that
how you look and feel is also affected by your food's bioavailability.
Say what?

What Is Bioavailability?

Bioavailability is a word borrowed from pharmacology, the study of drugs
and their effects on the body. In pharmacology, bioavailability means
the amount of a particular drug the body actually absorbs into the
bloodstream, not just the amount you take. It's how much medicine is
available for your body to use.

With respect to food, bioavailability means body ready: the nutrients
absorbed and available for your body to use. Naturally, you want to
maximize the body readiness of healthy nutrients for your system. Let me
give you some examples.

Say it's a beautiful summer day and you stop by your local farmers'
market to pick up a watermelon. You get it home and you kind of wish the
watermelon were cold, but you don't want to wait for it to cool down in
the refrigerator. Take heart. Watermelon that's been stored at room
temperature has up to 40 percent more lycopene and up to 139 percent
more beta-carotene than watermelon out of the cooler or your fridge.
Store and eat your watermelon at room temperature to maximize those
powerful antioxidants. And here's a little bonus. The lycopene and
beta-carotene in harvested watermelon actually increases over time-for
up to two weeks. So let that freshly picked melon mellow to maximize its
nutrients.

Sure, you already know that boiling vegetables reduces their nutritional
value. But if you're going to boil your vegetables, and I'd prefer you
steam them, do it in as little water and for as short a time as
possible. Reducing the amount of water and the cooking time reduces
nutrient loss and maximizes bioavailability.

I'm sure you've noticed how the color of the water turns slightly yellow
when you're boiling a yellow vegetable and tints green when you boil a
green vegetable, right? That's the avonoids leaching out of your meal.
Flavonoids are brilliant antioxidant compounds in vegetables that give
them their fabulous colors and activate your DNA repair system, helping
to protect you from cancer. Save that water and use it to make soup or
cook pasta.

Here's an example of how to maximize the body-readiness of vitamin C in
your fruit. Buy whole fruit and cut it up yourself. Although it's
easiest to grab the packages of presliced fruits your grocer has
conveniently prepared, studies show that preslicing fruit can reduce its
vitamin C content over time. Cantaloupe, kiwi, and pineapple seem
particularly prone to vitamin C loss when precut. Precut fruit costs you
more and you get less nutrition. I'd call that a double whammy. So, know
your fruit: for cantaloupe, kiwi, and pineapple, go whole and slice your
own.

The concept of body-readiness is vital to the ChefMD plan, because it is
the missing link to being simultaneously overweight and undernourished,
as so many people now are.

Why? Because our food is increasingly less nutritious than it used to
be-and not just processed fast foods. Researchers recently looked at
data from the USDA from 1950 and 1999 on the nutrient content of
forty-three different crops of fruits and vegetables. They found that
six out of thirteen nutrients had declined in these crops over the
fty-year period: protein was down by 6 percent, calcium by 16 percent,
phosphorus by 9 percent, iron by 15 percent, riboavin by 38 percent, and
vitamin C by about 20 percent. Furthermore, they found a strong
correlation between high yield in wheat crops and a loss of nutrients in
the wheat, such as zinc and phosphate. This was also true of high-yield
commercial broccoli and its level of calcium.

And it's not just vegetables. A British study showed that chicken in
2004 contained a third less protein than chicken in 1940. The twenty-
rst-century chicken also had more than twice as much fat and a third
more calories.

Wow. We've become much better at producing larger and larger quantities
of food, but bite for bite its nutritional value is smaller and smaller.

We don't know the precise reason for this decline in nutrition over the
past decades. Greater crop yields are seen by some as the culprit.
Whatever the reason, I want to help you to absorb more nutrients from
the food you eat-because the fact of the matter is that there are fewer
nutrients in it.

How much you eat; what other foods you eat at the same time; and how you
cook, store, and choose food all affect how much you absorb from what
you eat and how well your body can use it.

Some people point out that your genes dictate how you absorb nutrients,
and how unfair that is. Some people eat a healthy diet and die at fty;
others eat that same diet and thrive past one hundred. That's the
diet-gene paradox: our genes determine how we absorb what's in food
that's good for us, and not so good for us. But the amazing thing is
that food can tell your genes what to do, and with better
bioavailability, you can get even more from what you eat-no matter what
your genes.

Sadly, there are also barricades to bioavailability. Say, for example,
you're trying to get more leafy greens in your diet, a wonderful thing
to do. You've hit on a crunchy green, completely virtuous salad, with
beautiful red peppers, green peppers, a grape cherry tomato or two, with
a low-cal squeeze of lemon or store-bought fat-free dressing. You're
sitting pretty, having maybe 125 calories in a bowl as big as your head
and headed to weight-loss heaven. You may feel virtuous when you sit at
your desk at lunchtime with that lunch, and maybe also feel a little
jealous when you see your co- worker's Philly cheese steak.

What you might not know is that the fat-free dressing is actually
keeping you from absorbing the carotenoids in that green salad that can
help stave off cancer. Locked up inside that salad is nearly every
antioxidant you've ever heard of. You're getting less than you
could-unless you eat that salad with avocado, or with walnuts or roasted
walnut oil, or extra-virgin olive oil, or nearly any other good-for-you
fat.

Why? Because the oil makes the lutein in the green peppers, the
capsanthin in the red peppers, the lycopene in the tomato, even the
limonene in the lemon more body ready for you. Each of them is optimally
absorbed with a bit of fat. Even reduced-fat dressing won't let you get
as many of these valuable nutrients as you could. You've been running
from fat-who knew you might actually need it?

Later in the book, I'll teach you to make a simple and delicious
dressing for my Parmigiano Caesar Salad with Shrimp (page 121): the
olive and walnut oils give you healthy fat, ghting fatty buildup in the
arteries, offer great avor, and save you from the sugars that may be in
that bottled fat-free dressing. And there is an added bene t to this
particular salad dressing: its garlic contains allicin, a substance that
can ght hardening of the arteries. The garlic clove has to be exposed to
air to make the allicin active, and you'll do that when you crush it for
the dressing. Why not take the simple steps to unlock all the goodness
that salad has to offer?

I guarantee that an hour after your salad, you'll feel ne, while Mr.
Philly Cheese Steak may be passed out on his desk. All of those
saturated fats from his sandwich are now lying like melted cheese in his
arteries, constricting them not allowing them to dilate, which in turn
doesn't let his muscles get enough oxygen, making him fatigued. So now
he's out cold like a sh on ice at the Pike Place Market.

The foods we eat affect our bodies for good or for bad. With the ChefMD
approach, you give up none of the richness, satisfaction, and avor to
get more from what you eat. You absorb more of the cancer- ghting,
stroke-slaying, heart-disease-stopping antioxidants that only work when
they come from food, not pills. That's what this book is all about: the
celebration of healthful recipes that extract all the goodness from
every delicious morsel and every juicy bite. But before we go further,
let me offer a very short overview of what you need to know about
nutrition.

The Basics of Nutrition

Most of us were too busy passing notes or throwing spitballs to pay
attention when they taught us nutrition in grade school, so you may not
remember that there are only six types of nutrients: protein,
carbohydrates, fat, vitamins, minerals, and water.

However, there are also literally thousands of compounds in food that
are not technically nutrients. We talk about them as nutrients, but they
are really other kinds of bene cial compounds.

They're as important as the original six, because they regulate many of
the basic metabolic and physiologic processes that govern how your body
works, how your brain works, how your muscles work, and more. And in
food, these compounds are metabolized at many different levels in the
body, and present a powerful package of nutrition-more than any one
nutrient by itself.

Your nutrients have to be in a form that can be recognized by the body
to be absorbed. For example, if you swallow a piece of metal containing
iron because you're only eight and your brother dared you to do it, the
body will not recognize it as such and will not absorb the iron. But if
you eat a piece of liver, the body will recognize the iron it contains
and absorb it.

We need certain nutrients to avoid developing serious diseases such as
cancer, diabetes, and atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries), and
that need is constant. But the ability of our bodies' systems to get
essential nutrients to where they are needed uctuates. Like nutrition
itself, bioavailability is complicated. But we can make it work for us
with what we know now. And every day, scientists and physicians are
discovering new and exciting ways to get the most out of what we eat.

Now that you understand the basic concepts of nutrition and
bioavailability, I'll explain the three factors you can use to maximize
your food's bioavailability:

1. Freshness and quality

2. Food combinations

3. How food is processed and cooked

Once you understand these factors, you will be able to unlock the
secrets to getting more from what you eat.

FACTOR 1: FRESHNESS AND QUALITY

The rst step in absorbing more of the good stuff from your food is to
buy the best-quality food you can afford. When it comes to freshness and
quality the rst rule of thumb is to buy foods that look most similar to
their original form. You don't see square bread- crumb-covered halibut
swimming around in the ocean, right? I guess then we'd call them stick
sh. And what about chicken ngers? Since when do chickens have ngers? In
the ChefMD plan, fruits, vegetables, dairy, whole grains, legumes,
certain sh, tea, wine, dark chocolate, and nuts have the real star
power, with lean meats playing a supporting role.

Fruits and Vegetables

I'm crazy about fruits and vegetables-as a chef, a doctor, and as
someone who loves to eat good food. When you look at the vibrant and
beautiful palette found in most fruits and vegetables don't you think
Mother Nature is trying to tell us something? There's a reason it's not
called mad broccoli disease. I know that when you start to learn the
secret bene ts of produce and how easy they are to choose and prepare,
you'll come to love them more.

When shopping for fruits and vegetables, use at least three senses:
sight, touch, and smell.

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Author Profile

John La Puma

John La Puma MD is the leading physician voice for healthy eating as part of health, and a wellness, ethics and lifestyle expert. Both a board-certified practicing internist and professionally trained chef, he is a New York Times best-selling author twice, on healthy aging and diet. He currently hosts the nationwide PBS Special “Eat and Cook Healthy!” and is medical director and host of “Chef MD” on Lifetime TV. He is the first physician to teach a cooking and nutrition course in a U.S. medical school (SUNY-Syracuse), with Dr Michael Roizen of the Cleveland Clinic. Dr. La Puma specializes in weight management in Santa Barbara’s Chef Clinic.